Mr. Kann was holding up a yellow hall pass, not being unfriendly, reminding me that I would need permission to leave the classroom. I looked back and shrugged. It was the shrug I regretted. If I had it to do over again, I would just keep my eyes level, open the door, and walk out.
I liked Mr. Kann, and I usually enjoyed reading. But ever since my best friend, Perry Sheridan, moved to Seattle, school had lost a lot of its flavor. When I had the trouble with Mrs. Hean in World History I decided to quit. I straggled on for another few weeks, but it was a death march, class after class without really seeing or hearing.
“The cops should drive up to Rodeo and Hercules,” Earl was adding, making his voice full of ridicule as he mentioned the refinery towns, as though their names weren’t silly enough already. “Kick in some doors.”
I finally asked what I really wanted to know. “You didn’t see Bea, did you? Or did she get stomped to death in the stampede?”
“A hundred people got stomped to death,” he said, emphasizing hundred, as though giving me news any fool would know.
“I didn’t see any ambulances,” I said.
Earl gave a little whinny, finding my remark humorous.
A cat slipped from the shadows and hesitated at the curb, startled by the sound of our voices.
THREE
Bea was sitting on the curb in front of my house, her cap off, her head small and round. It made me pause, how delicate she looked with her new hairstyle. She pulled the cap back on when my shadow fell over her. Her new hairdo was an attempt to compete with her mom’s full-color good looks, a stab at finding a style of her own.
“Your mom was worried about you,” I said.
I had never told Bea about her mom’s moment of over-friendliness with me on New Year’s Eve. I considered it one of those things that happen over the holidays that you try not to carry with you into the new year.
“Aren’t you a little warm?” Bea asked. Bea must have noticed the way I kept my arm stiff over my jacket pocket. I ignored her, pinching the end of her knit cap and pulling it off in little jerks.
I wished I hadn’t. She hung her head and examined the residue left by the street sweeper. She sat there pressing her foot into the thin layer of dried silt left by the machine that careened up and down the street on the first Tuesday of every month. If someone left a car parked by the curb on those mornings the machine had to pass by, leaving a loop of faintly ridged dust you could see for days.
Her head was as close cut as you can get without a razor. It had the soft, burry look you want to reach out and touch. Bea was wearing a piece of jewelry, a little golden horseshoe pinned over her heart. Bea was obedient to her mother in a spiritless, mildly humorous way. Once I had asked Bea why her mother was heavily preoccupied with cowboys and cowgirls, and Bea had expressed a theory. She had said that some white people did not have much ethnic identity the way other races and cultures did, and that her mom was trying as hard as she could to come up with something resembling a folk tradition.
She said, “I had a feeling you might run off and leave me. I wasn’t all that surprised.”
I had nothing to say, taking a long look at the surface of the street.
I looked okay in the downstairs bathroom, except that the whites of my eyes were red, like beet juice.
My mom hates to stand still, and she’s always running late. When she’s home she likes to plant trees, paint the garage floor with waterproof sealant, replace the rubber washers in the pipes under the sink, running nonstop. One time I came in from a long trip delivering shower stalls to Stockton and she was in my room in a sleeveless sweatshirt, vacuuming my closet, the contents of my closet all over the room. Sometimes at seven in the morning she will decide to get the hedge trimmer out, and once she cut the electric cord in two, shorting out every light in the house. I woke up and found every lamp, the microwave, the television, dead to the world.
Mom manages a title company on Solano Avenue in Berkeley, and all her friends are manic, too. At parties they stand inches apart from each other and yell nonstop about capital gains. A title company orchestrates real estate sales and guarantees that the seller is the actual owner of the property. Mom has a computer with every house and apartment building in Alameda County.
Bea and I knew we were alone because the house was so quiet, so there was no danger of interrupting a meeting between Mom and her bookkeeper/boyfriend, Webster. Webster was a cheerful man who always had a pager clipped to his jogging pants. Somehow I knew Webster was not a replacement for my dad, but only temporary, and not likely to graduate into anything beyond the service department of my mom’s life.
The house was very quiet. Ever since I had started paying rent on my room as a symbolic gesture, Mom tried to leave my room alone, but when she was in the house you knew it. She was always on the phone, managing the Western hemisphere. Sometimes I wore yellow earplugs I had bought at Payless, although I could hear her voice perfectly through a couple of slugs of sponge rubber.
Bea was sometimes dazzled by my mother, afraid Mom would have her help tear up the kitchen tile or hold a wrench while Mom ripped out the garbage disposal. Listening to Mom explain mortgage rates, sometimes Bea’s eyes would meet mine and she would give me a smile with her eyes. It was something I have never seen anyone do so well—show a feeling or thought with a look.
I folded my jacket carefully and put it in a place where it did not belong, on the top shelf of my closet. Bea watched me favor the weight in the jacket, holding it in place so it wouldn’t fall out, but she made no comment.
Her eyes asked me what I was hiding in the jacket, and my eyes looked right back.
A school bus in Los Angeles had run into a sanitation truck, and children were critically injured. A space probe was getting close to the planet Jupiter, and even though its main antenna was not responding to commands, the backup system was expected to creak into life. After that the anchorman said, “Meanwhile, in Oakland tonight …” and the story covered mainly the traffic snarls from the “fracas caused by what police are calling out-of-town visitors cruising the streets around Oakland’s Lake Merritt.” Tear gas was mentioned, plus three arrests for public drunkenness.
My phone rang as the news went on to sports, basketball, huge guys arguing with a ref, thrown out of the game. I picked up the phone and heard the jolly voice, a voice so confident it was like an actor pretending to be hearty. I could imagine the director saying, “You’re very intelligent and very sure of yourself, a man of science.”
I turned off the television with my stocking foot, popping the knob with my big toe, mouthing Dad to Bea’s questioning glance.
“I just wanted to wish you luck.” He lived in San Francisco, just across the Bay, but in a way he occupied another world entirely, always traveling to give lectures or sign books he had written.
“Confidence is the key,” said my dad, a perky, gravelly voice, a voice they could use in ads, the manly optimist. People like my dad. He talks, and they listen. Even my mother gets along with him. “You know what Napoleon said about character.”
“It’s just a test,” I said, meaning that I had taken a thousand just like it.
“Sure, but they call them tests for a reason,” said my dad. His voice had a tone of argument running through it now. There were a lot of things he wanted to say but didn’t. I had promised him that I would get the degree, that quitting high school didn’t mean I would never get an education. I wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but I now thought that quitting school had been a mistake, a result of my hurt pride and general feeling of pointlessness when Perry took all his books about military history and left town with his parents.
Maybe if I hadn’t been so angry at Mrs. Hean I would still be in school. And if Perry hadn’t moved north, and if I had been born with a different nervous system, one that didn’t feel pride and anger. I wasn’t a hopeless student, although I preferred articles about armor-piercing bullets, friend-or-foe identification codes, and howitzers, to The Scarlet Le
tter. Perry and I had wanted to design a tank warfare game, but our plans were interrupted when his dad got transferred, Sea/Land expanding its Seattle office. Perry’s dad was a rising expert in robot off-loaders and was going to design ways to unpack ships full of bananas and cocoa butter.
“Napoleon said, ‘Character is destiny,’” I heard myself say.
“What?” My dad was distracted by someone in the room with him, his second wife or his toddler son. I wondered if that babbling in the background was their three-year-old, unable to sleep. Or did Sofia, his young wife, engage in baby talk, sitting around in her nightie with a pout?
I repeated myself.
I had the books my dad had written, Tiny Eden and The Armies of the Earth. He beamed at me from the back cover of Prehistoric Future, a man who didn’t seem to get older from photograph to photograph. At some point in my childhood, he had gotten a little weather-beaten, a little bald, and then stayed that way, sometimes tanned and sometimes needing a shave, just back from Brazil or a conference in Copenhagen. Through the years his image smiled out at all of us, people who didn’t know as much as he did.
“That’s what he said,” my dad agreed. “Hey, we’re going butterflying on the Peninsula this weekend, don’t forget.” He had been wanting to show me the Serra Skipper, an orange-and-white butterfly of the Hesperidae family, native to three acres of serpentine outcropping along the San Andreas Fault.
My careless attitude toward the test was a front. I had been studying every night, keeping quiet about it, English grammar and the U.S. Constitution and those workbooks, how to annihilate the Graduate Equivalence Degree exam.
“You’ll call me,” he said.
Perky but commanding, the way he always is, telling me not to let him down.
FOUR
I took the dust cover off my computer while Bea sat there, the television sound turned to a murmur.
When the machine was running the screen reported that I had one message. I never knew what Perry was going to tell me. I had imagined the Northwest to be a rainy, mossy region, but Perry gave me the impression that it was a place so booming no one had time to send E-mail.
“Second day of kayak lessons,” read Perry’s message. “Might switch back to canoe. My coach is brain-dead.”
“You ought to be used to brainless teachers,” I messaged back, “having grown up in Oakland.” We treated communication as Ping-Pong, pretending distance didn’t exist. But our humor was getting heavy handed, and where we used to like the same movies and laugh about the gaffes announcers made on television, the tone of our E-mail was drifting.
No use waiting for Perry to reply—he would be playing handball or renting an all-terrain vehicle. I turned off the computer. The molted husk of a scorpion, a Sculpted Centroides, resembled a living, glittering creature beside a rolled-up pair of gym socks.
Taped to a corner of the desk was a snapshot of Perry holding a model we had worked on when we were in junior high, a Fokker triplane the Germans used in World War I. Perry was smiling, wind mussing his brown hair, the oversized wooden model almost too much for one person to cradle in his arms.
“You were terrible at math a year ago, Zachary,” Bea was saying, tilting her head out of habit, the way she used to keep the hair from cascading before her eyes. Hair grows about six inches a year.
And yet she was still Bea, gazing at me and thinking about me as she studied my attitude, the way I put my hands into my pants pockets and challenged her to give me any advice. She made a little questioning look: what makes you think you’ve mastered quadratic equations now?
“My dad wished me luck,” I said. Meaning: why don’t you?
Sometimes I wish I had another name. All through elementary school there were several Zack’s, and in fourth grade I told my teacher to call me by my middle name, David. Notes would come home from school, David excels at soccer but needs encouragement in reading. My mother put on her padded shoulders—they were in style then, and she had a closet full of line-backer jackets—and marched off to stare down Mrs. Faber, who afterward tried not to call my name at all.
I followed Bea at a distance, out of the house, down the front yard. All that long walk down the corridor from junior English and across the parking lot no one had accosted me, no one had said good-bye, Zachary Madison, good luck with your life. I had gone to the library the next day, before I told my father, and spent a whole morning hunting down how to get a degree without finishing high school—a GED. Never pronounced like a syllable, but as individual letters.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Bea. Bee. A little name—you had to smile when you said it out loud.
Of course one part of me wanted to say, “Sorry for what,” in my best Earl imitation, what Mr. Kann had called stone-age nonchalance.
She turned, standing right in the place I had parked my Honda four nights ago. “Are you sure,” the cops had asked, “this was where you parked it last?” Its distinctive grease stains were still there under the streetlight, a cluster of black oil spots. Bea put her face up to mine, her cheeks cold, although her lips were warm. “When is the test?” she asked.
“Nine-thirty A.M.,” I said.
“I’ll pick you up,” she said. “About eight-thirty?”
Metal signs with the words NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH gleam from the streetlights. The signs display a pair of keen eyes looking out a window. The two cops who took my stolen car report, a man and a woman, had said this was the worst area for car thefts. Not for rape, not for robbery or murder. The rapists and murderers walk over into this green, tree-lined neighborhood when they don’t have money for a cab.
“I’ll just take the bus,” I said.
When Bea was gone I stood listening just inside the house, wanting to be sure I didn’t hear my mother’s Volvo humming up the drive. I slipped back into my room and carefully withdrew my jacket from the top shelf of the closet.
I braced my feelings for disappointment. It would turn out to be a toy or a replica fit only to be mounted on a wall.
It was flat black, no shine to the metal. The hammer and grip were crosshatched with a fine, rough no-slip surface. I held it flat in my hand, afraid of it. I kept myself thinking, talking inwardly, sure that this wasn’t a real gun. It had to be a stage prop.
The barrel was not filled in like a starting pistol, and the chambers of the cylinder were occupied. This was a loaded gun, a revolver with six bullets. I put it down gently on the top of my desk and stepped back. I read about weapons in magazines, and once my dad and I had gone to a gun club in Fremont with a friend showing off his new Colt Python. I remembered having no trouble placing shots in the middle of the white paper target.
A .38. The thing lay beside the gym sock and the computer. From my place beside the closet door I could see a scuff on the wooden grip, where the harsh asphalt had abraded the walnut stain. If the gun went off now it would blow the pillow all over the room.
When I was in first grade my dad brought home an ant farm. We set it up in the dining-room window. In those days my mother and my father were already beginning to retire their marriage, my dad spending two or three weekends a month away from home, most of the summer in the field, working hard on his first book, the one that had made his name.
The little reddish insects hollowed out tunnels, a lace of empty space, sunlight or darkness, that stretched down through the sandy earth. The bread crumbs I sprinkled into their world, the eyedropper of water, allowed them to thrive, manipulating the boulders of food down the shafts of their city.
Sometimes at night, if I could not sleep, I imagined a city underground, a human city, its many galleries harboring rest and play, stairways ever deeper, into greater and greater safety. Sometimes during the day I sketched these tunnels, the chambers for food, the halls for sports, the deepest, most secure rooms for slumber.
I didn’t know where to hide the weapon. I slipped the gun into the bottom drawer of my dresser, with old drawings and school reports: “The Vanishing Mayan Cities of the Yucatan,�
�� “Pioneers of Flight.” Then, very carefully, I withdrew it and covered it artfully with shoes in the bottom of my closet.
I undressed and pulled on my pajamas, but I knew I couldn’t sleep with it in the room. I didn’t even want to turn off the light.
What if tonight Mom came home with paint rollers and gallons of Navajo Sunrise latex she had won at a raffle, like the time three months before. What if she started to paint the house, the radio blasting All Oldies at two A.M., only this time I wouldn’t have to put up with it.
I wouldn’t have to go out and turn off the radio and stand in my pajamas waiting for her to get done yelling, spots of off-white all over her face.
I might forget myself, and lose control.
Or maybe she would find it first, like the time she had found the cigarette paper in my wallet, all flat and wrinkled from being sat on for months. She said she wasn’t going to be one of those mothers who went into denial, and began to dismantle my room, underwear and old shoes all over the place, wrecking my wasps’ nest.
I took my pajamas off and climbed into my weathered Levis and an Oakland Raiders T-shirt so old the pirate was flaking off. Listening all the while for my mother’s car, I took a jar of Vaseline down from her medicine cabinet. I slathered the gun with petroleum jelly, so the cylinder was thick with it, the SMITH & WESSON on the barrel impossible to see. I held my breath when I coated the trigger and the hammer gently, very gently.
When the gun was encased in half a jar of gunk, I settled it into a plastic Safeway bag, a few green pearls of broccoli at the bottom. The Safeway S got stretched out of shape, but the plastic held. I washed my hands very carefully at the kitchen sink, a thorough job, using Palmolive dish soap and hot water.
The back lawn was wet with dew, the grass squeaking under my unlaced shoes. The night was windless. The leaves of my bean garden hung motionless, the ground still moist where I had watered the Kentucky blue wonders that morning. I rummaged for a spade in the toolshed, beside the sack of lawn nutrient my mother had been spreading all over in the middle of the night the week before. I dug a hole, listening for my mother’s car from time to time, hearing only the night sounds, the far-off murmur of the freeway.
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